Back on Sept. 30, Neville Hobson’s blog offered up an item about the emerging concept of “podcasting” and followed it up a couple days ago with another piece that went into more detail on the idea. I’ve also received an e-mail from my friend Bill Boyd, who has just heard of the notion (“Just when I think I’m starting to get a handle on the new technologies, up pops another one.)

Now, the blog Engadget has released a podcasting “how-to” guide.

Podcasting, if you haven’t already heard of it, is a new use for RSS that allows you to subscribe to audio files. As the Engadget tutorial explains, “To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn?t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.”

The tutorial covers how to get podcasts onto your iPod, a show to which you can subscribe to try it out, and details about creating your own podcast.

Doc Searls, one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, notes in his blog (referenced by both Hobson and Engadget), “podcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.?

Neville offers some suggestions about the possible PR applications, such as a weekly CEO broadcast to employees and a commentary to investors.